Read Online Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr by Linda Porter - Free Book Online Page B

custody of the lord chamberlain. Perhaps the dispute was initially about money – Henry VII valued his aristocracy more for their purses than their equestrian skills – but, whatever the cause, Edward Borough ended up in the Fleet prison. His escape from that institution put him in debt to the Crown to the tune of £3,000, which had a catastrophic effect on his family’s immediate prospects.
    If Edward Borough had been emotionally unstable at the time of his dispute with Henry VII, the outcome only made him worse. By 1510 he was judged as ‘having unsound mind with lucid intervals’. His estates were administered by the Crown and the profits from them helped to repay debts from Henry VIII’s French wars. Edward continued to live at Gainsborough Old Hall, but it fell to his eldest son, Sir Thomas Borough, to put all the effort into restoring the family’s estates and local standing. It was Sir Thomas, who, as Maud Parr acknowledged in her will, became the relatively young father-in-law of Katherine Parr less than a year after the death of his own, troubled parent.
    A lot of nonsense has been written in historical novels about Katherine Parr’s first marriage. Even her most recent biographer, while making quite clear that her husband was not the elderly Lord Edward Borough but his young grandson, refers to Katherine’s life at Gainsborough Hall with ‘a lunatic rattling his chains in the attic’. It is a colourful image, but Lord Edward died in August 1528, well before Katherine’s wedding to his namesake. If there were noises of chains in the attic, they must have been from the tragic lord’s ghost. 6
    It was, though, a difficult situation for a young woman from a happy and stable background, dominated by a very competentmother, to find herself in a troubled family tightly governed by a strong-willed and opinionated father. Sir Thomas Borough had been compelled to take over the day-to-day running of his family’s affairs at an early age. He had seen his father disgraced and removed from society and his own prospects compromised as a result. Not for him the courtly entertainments of Greenwich that had figured so largely in the lives of Sir Thomas and Lady Maud Parr. Though personally brave (he was knighted after the battle of Flodden) and appointed one of the king’s aristocratic bodyguards, the King’s Spears, he was not close to Henry VIII and was seldom at court. The responsibility of keeping his family together meant that he spent most of his time in Lincolnshire, where he married Agnes Tyrwhit, the daughter of another leading family in the county, produced sons of his own and devoted himself to giving his offspring the direction of a strong father-figure that he himself had never known.
    That he comes across through the centuries as harsh and overbearing is not surprising. He was certainly a difficult man, but he was not some ancient tyrant. Born in 1494, he was thirty-five at the time of his eldest son’s wedding, which surely means that Katherine Parr’s bridegroom could not have been, at the most, more than a few years older than she. It must have been clear to an intelligent young woman like Katherine, right from the outset of her marriage, that if she could not establish a reasonable relationship with Lord Borough, then life at Gainsborough would be a struggle. 7 Her father-in-law was a man of his times and, as master of the household, he expected obedience. He does not seem to have mellowed as he grew older. In 1537 Lady Elizabeth Borough, wife of his second son, wrote in despair to Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, complaining of the ‘trouble she is put to by Lord Borough, who always lies in wait to put her to shame’. She had heard that her father-in-law had complained of her to the Privy Council, declaring that her child was not his son’s. She begged Cromwell to prevent the little boy from being disinherited, adding that her husband ‘dare do nothing but as hisfather will have him’. 8